Panama Plans to Turn
Bases
Into Hotels for Eco-Tourists
By JOSE DE CORDOBA
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET
JOURNAL
SEMAPHORE HILL, Panama -- Banker turned bird watcher Raul Arias de Para
knows a thing or two about recycling.
As a police official in the democratic government that took over after
U.S. troops deposed Manuel Noriega in 1989, Mr. Arias de Para helped
transform the bases and training camps of Gen. Noriega's defunct armed
forces into orphanages and schools.
A decade later, Mr. Arias de Para has turned his attention to a former
secret radar tower in the middle of Panama's rain forest that was once used
by the U.S. military in the Canal Zone to track Colombian drug flights. The
four-story galvanized-steel structure is topped by a radar dome that pokes
out of the rain-forest canopy and resembles a giant yellow golf ball
incongruously resting on a jungle green. Mr. Arias de Para has blow-torched
windows into the building, hung hammocks and transformed it into an airy,
seven-room eco-lodge. Open for just one year, the Canopy Tower has already
been selected by Audubon magazine as one of the world's nine "ultimate
outposts" in eco-resorts. Now, from the deck of the tower, nature lovers
from New Jersey thrill as king vultures soar above the forest and howler
monkeys swing from the trees.
Mr. Arias de Para, 52 years old, who likes to wear a maroon Australian
bush hat when he drives the 40 minutes from Panama City to this idyll, is a
pioneer, but he is hardly alone. Now that the U.S. has finished turning
over the Panama Canal and the dozens of military installations that dot the
500-square miles of the Canal Zone, a number of buildings are being turned
into hotels.
Entrepreneurs like Mr. Arias de Para hope to catch up with Costa Rica
next door, where tourists bring in about $900 million a year. "Panama has
90 more species of birds than Costa Rica, and a lot fewer bird watchers,"
Mr. Arias de Para keeps repeating.
Convinced that such friendly tourism will help preserve the rain forest,
the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, the Panamanian branch of
Washington's Smithsonian Institution, is advising Mr. Arias de Para and
others. "We can teach guides about howler monkeys or show them where to put
a nature trail," says Ira Rubinoff, the institute's director.
Down the road from the Canopy Tower is the Gamboa Rainforest Resort,
which the Smithsonian is also advising on such matters as where to locate a
frog pond. When it opens in March, the $30 million, 100-bed luxury hotel
and spa, will offer spectacular views of the Chagres River, as well as
nature tours, an orchid house, botanical gardens, golf and tennis.
Gamboa developer Herman Bern hopes to attract wealthy bird-watchers and
nature lovers from around the world to what was once the headquarters for
the Panama Canal's dredging division. Already open are a riverfront
restaurant and a row of early 20th-century colonial wood houses that Mr.
Bern has converted into 44 two-bedroom villas.
And on Panama's Atlantic side, Spain's Sol Melia SA is set to open a $25
million, 310-room hotel on the former grounds of the controversial School
of the Americas, the alma mater of a rogues' gallery of Latin American
military dictators educated here in the arts of war by U.S. military
instructors.
The hotel's manager-to-be, Zenon Jimenez, says that no skeletons have
been dug up at the site of what will be known as the Melia Panama Canal,
even though "we've moved a lot of dirt."
To be sure, there won't be any suites named after Gen. Noriega, who
studied the fine points of psychological warfare here, nor the late Maj.
Roberto D'Aubuisson, of the Salvadoran death squads, who took a course in
radio communications. "The past hasn't been considered a selling point for
the hotel," Mr. Jimenez says as he strolls past a toppled antiaircraft gun
that once adorned the entrance to the main building. Mr. Jimenez says he
thinks the gun will stay. "We will put it somewhere," he says.
Also staying is a small concrete amphitheater that has a commanding view
of Lake Gatun, the canal and three small jungle islands that are part of
the hotel complex. In the old days, Mr. Jimenez says, officer-students
would sit on the benches to be briefed on the day's maneuvers. But Mr.
Jimenez thinks the benches could make a swell place for stressed-out
executives to look at the howler monkeys and the abundant birds.
The hotel comprises three large buildings that have been gutted and
repainted burnt orange. Accentuated by red barrel-tile roofs, the hotel
complex has a warm tropical ambience. "It gives it a wholly different
sensation, totally different from the old days," Mr. Jimenez says, walking
past camouflage-green poles of a demolished obstacle training-course.
Indeed, where once Latin American army officers worried about the
Communist peril with their American mentors, relaxing executives will smoke
Cuban cigars in a mahogany-paneled smokers' emporium or drink cocktails by
the pool. And where military men from the Hemisphere trained for jungle
warfare, bird-watchers will now trek through nature trails laid out with
advice from the Smithsonian.
Though a recent poll found 68% of Panamanians wishing that the U.S. were
staying in Panama, many people here believe the transformations being
wrought by Sol Melia, Mr. Arias de Para, Mr. Bern and others augur a bright
future for this small, friendly, humid country.
"There's nothing less efficient than a bunch of soldiers sitting in a
barracks waiting for a war to happen," says Roberto Eisenmann, a leading
businessman and hotel owner who has enthusiastically embraced
eco-tourism.
While Sol Melia's Mr. Jimenez is ambivalent about his hotel's history,
Mr. Arias de Para at the Canopy Tower is trying to incorporate as much
information as possible about the radar tower's mysterious past for the
edification of his guests. But it has been tough.
Despite pleas to several top U.S. officers, including a bird-watching
Air Force general, Mr. Arias de Para says he has been unable to obtain
photographs of his hotel during its previous incarnation.
What is known is that the tower was built in 1965, at the height of the
Cold War, and served a stint as a monitoring post for drug flights coming
from Latin America. Mr. Arias de Para found that out by accident when,
during construction, a former radar operator dropped by and cleared up the
puzzle of the tower's water well, which for some reason had been bricked
over.
"He said the Americans were concerned that Colombian cartels would
poison the water supply," Mr. Arias de Para says. "So they ordered it
covered up and trucked in the water."
U.S. government secrecy has been a headache for Otto Probst, who is set
to open another eco-friendly resort of some 14 cabins on the tropical
island paradise of San Jose, about 54 miles south of the Panama Canal's
Pacific entrance. Rare albino crocodiles and dwarf deer roam the
12,000-acre island. There is one small problem. During World War II, the
U.S. used the island to test mustard-gas bombs, among other things.
Mr. Probst, who has worked for 30 years on the island, which reverted
back to Panama after World War II, swears it is safe. Although he
occasionally stumbles onto the odd bomb fragment, he has never found
"anything live, anything explosive." Still, he would like the Pentagon to
give his island paradise a clean bill of health. So far, the U.S. is
dragging its feet. "They say they can't tell us what they tested there,"
says Mr. Probst. "Top secret, they say."
Write to Jose De Cordoba at
jose.decordoba@wsj.com
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